A Russian teenager who was detained in the Tatarstan region after he brought a pistol and a knife to his school in May has been found mentally unstable.
The regional Prosecutor-General's Office said on September 18 that "experts have concluded that the boy is mentally unfit to stand trial."
The 17-year-old boy, whose identify has not been disclosed, was arrested on May 13 after he brought a pistol and a knife to the School No. 7 in Tatarstan’s capital, Kazan.
Some reports at the time said that he had held classmates hostage, which has been neither confirmed nor rejected by the authorities.
There have been several attacks recently in schools in Russia, as well as a gun-and-bomb attack on a college in Russian-controlled Crimea in which authorities say an 18-year-old killed 20 people in October 2018 before fatally shooting himself.
Nobody was hurt in the incident in Kazan, which took place a year after a teenager in the neighboring region of Bashkortostan entered his school and stabbed a female student and a teacher before setting a classroom on fire. Another girl sustained serious injuries when she fled by jumping from a second-story window.
A court in the Urals city of Perm sentenced a 17-year-old teenager to seven years in prison in April after finding him guilty of a knife attack at his school that left 12 people hospitalized with stab wounds in January 2018.
